News and notes from and for the Mozilla community.

Here are some happenings in the MDN community that were shared in the most recent MDN community meeting. MDN Community meetings take place every other Wednesday, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, in the #mdn channel on irc.mozilla.org. The MDN Community meetings section of the Mozilla wiki has notes for past meetings; a page is created for the agenda of each upcoming meeting a few days beforehand.

Events

MDN community members Jannis Lidel, Florian Scholz, and Jean-Yves Perrier attended the Write The Docs EU conference in Budapest, on March 31 to April 1st. Jannis gave a talk on Search and Find: Making MDN Discoverable. They reported enjoying it thoroughly, and recommend such conferences to other MDN community members. For example, Write The Docs US is coming up in Portland in May (Ali Spivak is speaking), and OpenHelp is in Cincinnati in June (I am speaking; let me know if you want to attend).

Florian and Jean-Yves also went to a Mozilla German community doc sprint Berlin, which covered both MDN and SUMO. They worked on translating docs for Firefox Developer Tools into German, and on recording translations of the Dev Tools screencasts.

Content

Now that Kuma’s support for moving pages seems to be working pretty well, a big push will be happening over the next few weeks to move pages into a more rational structure. This work will be based on the analysis of MDN’s “content islands” done by Florian Scholz, and may include archiving obsolete docs and deleting irrelevant docs.

In a similar vein, work on reorganizing MDN’s “meta-documentation” is nearly completed, except for a few straggling pages. Once that’s completed, we’ll have retrospective to look at what still needs to be done to improve it. Stay tuned to the dev-mdc discussion list for details.

The first phase of the project to revitalize the Learning Area of MDN is now underway, which is to flesh out the glossary. Ideally, each item should have a one- or two-sentence summary, a more detailed “In depth” section, and links to other sources to learn more.

Platform

The MDN web development team has greatly improved the experience of the revision dashboard. It’s now much faster and lets you view multiple diffs inline.

On the project to improve compatibility tables on MDN, the data requirements have now been defined and the data schema is being finalized. Follow the tracking bug to stay current. The project leader, Jérémie Patonnier, will start working with the UX team to improve the contribution workflow for compatibility data.

Janet is a Mozilla Community Manager for Mozilla Developer Network. She joined Mozilla in 2010, and has been involved in open source software since 2004 and in technical communication since the 20th century. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and a standard poodle.